


and miles to go before I sleep

by thewayofthetrashcompactor (BriarLily)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Dissociation, Don't Try This At Home, F/M, Hitchhiking, Road Trips, Strangers to Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:48:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22077220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BriarLily/pseuds/thewayofthetrashcompactor
Summary: Kylo's used to his schedule. He might not like his job, but Snoke has promised him results for his hard work. He goes to work, goes home, gets paid.Something has disrupted his schedule, his life. He doesn't know what to do.So he drives. And he finds he's not the only one lost on the way to nowhere.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 25
Kudos: 105
Collections: House Cryber Holiday Cookie Exchange





	and miles to go before I sleep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TazWren](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TazWren/gifts).



> Quick oneshot for now, I was hoping to get something longer done, but I hope the prompter likes this! The prompts were great, and I'm planning to follow up on this once the holidays pass, lol.

It hits Ben on the highway somewhere over the state line that he has no idea where he’s going.

It’s a miracle he hasn’t crashed so far, really. His only thought after his confrontation with Snoke was to get out. So he had, walking out of the old man’s office, then the building, somehow ending up in his car and driving out of the city. He hadn’t made any of the turns that would have taken him back to his high-rise apartment, the same path he’d traveled every evening for years. Instead, he’d found himself on the interstate heading west, driving like some other self had taken over his body. 

Some distant part of him registers he’s going eighty-five miles an hour, edging up to ninety, on his way to nowhere. Forget crashing, he’s lucky he hasn’t been pulled over. His mind feels like it’s somewhere slightly to the left of his body. He eases up on the gas slightly, though for some reason his foot still wants to press down to the floor and send him hurtling into the unknown. 

He checks the gas gauge, and realizes that with less than a quarter tank left, he should probably find somewhere to stop sooner rather than later. He has a nice car, probably meant as more than a “fuck you” to his dad’s revolving garage of junkers than he’d like to admit, but it hasn’t been driven like this in its life. He spends most of his time driving in traffic, and he’s not even sure what his mileage might be outside of the city. 

He starts paying attention to the landscape passing by in an abstract sort of way, looking for any sign of an exit that might have a convenient place to stop. Now that the first haze has passed, he realizes he could probably use a cup of coffee. He hasn’t thought about how far he’ll be going, but he doesn’t plan to stop. 

The empty fields and hills rolling by outside start to give him an idea of how long he’s been driving already. He’s not even sure which state he’s in anymore. Several miles pass without any hint of human habitation, just trees and sheer rock. He glances at the gas gauge again. It hasn’t dropped too much. With any luck, he’ll make it to the next exit, but luck is one of many things he’s been lacking lately.

He supposes he could dig out his phone from where he’s tossed it somewhere in the footwell of the passenger’s seat, but he doesn’t want to face that yet. He doesn’t know which would be worse: confronting an endless list of missed calls, texts, and emails, or an empty phone, a sign he wasn’t worth bothering with once he’d left. He hasn’t spent a day without being paranoid about missing one of Snoke’s calls for years. A flicker of feeling, something like freedom, passes through his chest, but it sinks into the haze surrounding him. 

Finally, before the needle on the gas gauge dips fully below ‘empty’, he comes up on an exit that the signs along the highway say has a gas station. He sees the truck stop as he slows down and he guides his car into the near-empty parking lot. 

He gets out, and stands in front of the pump. He’s perfectly capable of taking care of his car, for reasons he doesn’t want to think too hard about. And he can pump his own gas; it’s not like he lives in Jersey for fuck’s sake, but all the steps to do so have fled him. He’s been on autopilot since he left. Doing anything more concrete than guiding his car down the road is apparently beyond his capabilities for the moment. The gas pump feels so… real. Concrete. And he’s not sure he exists on the same level as that at the moment. 

“Are you okay?” a voice asks. He turns, feeling like he should have noticed the woman standing at the end of his car. She looks at him through narrowed hazel eyes, but she reaches out to him like she wants to help. He blinks. She still stands there, wisps of brown hair that have loosened from her odd trio of buns blowing around her face in the slight breeze. The winter sun outside of the shelter over the gas pumps shines golden on her slim figure, picking out the holes in her thin sweater. She shivers slightly and tucks her hands into the pockets of her worn jeans. “Sir?”

He blinks again, and it’s like coming back to himself. He feels the same chill breeze through his dress shirt. “I’m--” His voice sounds like it comes from somewhere outside of himself, and he can’t think of what to say next. 

The woman takes a couple of careful steps closer, her brow furrowing as she tilts her head to look up at him. She’s not short, but he still has to look down to meet her eyes. “Do you need help?” 

Does he? Probably. Whatever he needs is a bit much to put on a stranger at a gas station in the middle of nowhere though. 

She takes another step when he doesn’t answer, the crease between her brows deepening. “Can I call someone?”

He snorts, finally provoked into a reaction. Even if he hadn’t cut all the ties he’d spent years building, he couldn’t imagine a time when Snoke, or any of his coworkers would care that he was having an existential crisis in a truck stop, besides finding the next person to replace him. Hux would probably take the opportunity to celebrate before scurrying to Snoke to take his place. 

The woman’s lips twitch into a small smile. “Guess not. That’s okay, I get it.” And for some bizarre reason, he knows she’s not just saying that. She understands. 

Or maybe he’s just having a mental breakdown over a stranger at a gas station. Maybe his father was right, and surrounding himself with people who want to stab him in the back was going to drive him crazy one of these days. 

The thought reminds him of the wound he’s been ignoring all this time, and draws a quick breath. The woman notices and takes the last step into him, her hand gripping his arm.

“What’s wrong?” she says.

He can’t answer. Her touch grounds him like nothing else has, sticking him in place. He feels the press of her fingers through his shirt, the chill of her skin, the slim breadth of her hand trying to circle his arm. He has a sudden thought of worry for her, what she’s doing out here all alone and cold, but he can’t think through what he should do about that. 

“I--” he tries again. Her hand tightens and her thumb brushes against him. Somehow, he draws strength from that. “I’m fine,” he says, and even he can hear how unconvincing he sounds. 

The woman clearly hears it too. “Are you sure? Do you want to sit down for a bit?” she offers. “They have coffee inside, you should get something before heading back on the road.”

She’s right, he knows, but that seems like more than he can manage right now. “I’m fine,” he repeats, and to drive the point home, he turns to the gas pump. Her hand falls away. He looks at the grease-stained digital display, then reaches for the handle of the pump. 

“You have to pay first,” the woman points out. “They take card, or you can pay cash inside.”

He nods. He knew that. He fishes his wallet from his back pocket, hesitating before pulling out his debit card. He swipes it, and thankfully, it goes through without his bank calling to check to make sure it’s really him. He has to duck back into his car to open the cover for the gas, but he manages to get through the rest of starting to fill the tank without incident. He locks the handle in place and watches the numbers climb on the digital display. 

For some reason, the woman hasn’t left. “So where are you going?” she asks, sounding like she actually wants to know the answer. 

He’d like to know as well. “West,” he says, since that’s the direction he’s been heading so far. He has a vague awareness of the letter he’d read earlier that day, where his mother had told him she’d moved her small group of insurgents out to the opposite coast after… everything, but that’s another on the long list of things he doesn’t want to think about too closely yet. 

The woman nods. “My friend went out that way. I keep thinking maybe I’ll go one of these days.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that. He stays silent and watches the numbers slow as his tank reaches its limit. The pump clicks, and he removes the handle and replaces it in its cradle. The machine offers him a receipt, but he ignores it to replace the gas cap and close the cover.

When he turns back to get into his car, the woman has disappeared. He glances around, but she must have gone back into the rest station or back to whatever one of the few other cars she came from. It’s not like he was worth talking to. He buckles himself back in, starts the car, and gets back on the road. 

It takes him a couple hours, when the sun starts setting on the road before him, for him to remember he’d meant to get coffee, like the woman suggested. The sun shines directly into his view, even with his eyes squinted and the visor flipped down, and it feels a bit too easy to let his eyes slip closed the rest of the way. The second time this happens, he’s just passing another exit, and he makes a last minute decision to take it. He swerves, passing over the rumble strips to just barely make it into the other lane. As the brakes squeal, he hears a more unexpected sound from the backseat: something slides along the floor of the car in the backseat and hits the inside of the door with a grunt. 

He slams fully onto the brakes and looks behind. Curled up on the floor between the front and back seats is the woman who’d talked to him at the gas station, who he’d just been thinking about. 

He gapes, then finds his voice. “What the _fuck_.”

She frowns up at him. “Did you just stop in the middle of the road? You should pull over before someone rear ends you.”

He doesn’t move. He keeps staring at her, as if that will make her presence in his car make sense. With a sigh, she stretches out from her crouched position on the floor and pulls herself up on the passenger seat, crawling over to sit in it like she belongs there. He watches, still struck dumb. 

“You can’t just stay here,” she says, tapping the steering wheel. “There’s a gas station up ahead, pull in there and we can talk.” 

He looks where she’s pointing and sees the gas station he’d been aiming for. He looks back to her, where she’s settled expectantly into the seat, and lets off the brake. 

They pull into a parking spot with no particular grace. She grabs the handle above the door as he slams to a stop, and they both jerk as he puts the car in park. He turns back to her, the first thing like an emotion starting to rise through the mire he’s been lost in since leaving the city. 

“What the fuck!” he says again. It seems to encapsulate everything he’s experiencing. 

She winces. “In my defense,” she starts, “I was expecting you to notice a lot sooner.”

He stares at her, mouth working through possible responses to that and finding none. “ _What_?”

She shrugs. “I was barely hiding. I figured you’d catch on once you’d been on the highway for a bit, but it’s been hours. You’re really not okay, are you?”

“Me?” He didn’t think he had it in him to feel indignant, but he’s learning all sorts of new things very quickly. “You’re the one who got into a stranger’s car!”

“You were the best option,” she explains calmly. “Besides, I was worried about you.”

“You -- what?” He’s spent the better part of a decade as a competent, well-paid professional. He’s never been at a loss for words so often in all that time. 

“You were so out of it, I was pretty sure you were going to end up driving off the road. Impressed you didn’t, by the way, but you got close.”

He’s never been great at reading people, and he has no idea what to make of her right now. Her brow has that furrow he remembers, like she’s concerned for him, but the way her hand grips the door makes him think she’s more nervous than she’s acting. He doesn’t know what he was expecting when he left this morning, but it certainly wasn’t this. 

“So you got in my car… to save me?” He almost feels like laughing, but that might be hysteria. 

“That was part of it,” she says. He looks again at her hand on the door.

“And the rest?” 

Her gaze flicks past him to the parking lot outside. “I told you,” she says, voice quieter. “My friend left for a job out west.” He remembers that part, but she continues. “He asked me to come with him, but I wasn’t ready. Now I am.”

“So I was just the first convenient stranger?” he asks, hardly able to believe what he’s hearing. 

She shakes her head quickly. “I didn’t start out in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania. I got a ride with this guy heading out from Philly to Pittsburgh, but once we got out into the mountains, he got… weird. I got off the first time he stopped.”

“Oh.” That makes an uncomfortable amount of sense. But still -- “Why me? I could have been just as bad. You knew you couldn’t hide the whole time.”

She cocks her head at him. “You weren’t,” she says, with an unnerving amount of confidence. 

“You couldn’t know that!” He wants to reach out and shake her, make her understand. The idea of her risking her safety on truck stop strangers bothers him more than he understands. 

She shrugs again, and it drives his blood pressure higher. “I couldn’t be sure, but I had a good feeling.”

“A good _feeling_?” He glares at her slight smile. “I could have been a murderer!”

“To be fair, I wasn’t sure you weren’t,” she admits. “You definitely have that vibe of someone on the run.”

He waves a hand wildly between them. “And you still hid in my car?” He hears his voice raising in the confined car. 

“You hadn’t watched the other people coming through that truck stop for hours,” she says grimly. “You didn’t have a gun rack or visible porn on your dash. You were looking miles better even before I talked to you.”

He presses his lips together. He sees her point, even if he hates that she was making those choices. “I barely said anything. How did that make you think you could trust me?”

She hesitates. “I don’t know about trust, but you seemed... lost. It felt like a good bet.”

Silence falls between them. She’s right; he’s more lost than he’s been in his life. And now he’s lost with a pretty stranger in his care, who’s decided for some reason she cares about what happens to him. And she put her safety in his hands. Either of those is completely bizarre to him on its own, and his brain is struggling to piece all this together. 

Finally, he takes a deep breath. He sees her tense as he starts talking. “You --”

“Please let me come with you,” she cuts him off in a rush of words.

“What?” She’s thrown him off again and he doesn’t even have room for disbelief. 

“Please let me come with you.” She slows down and enunciates the words this time, her eyes fixed on him with intent. 

“We just established that you think I might have killed someone,” he says, trying to keep up.

Her shoulders bob in that shrug he’s becoming far too acquainted with. “You might have. You haven’t tried to kill me, and you’ve had both reason and opportunity.” 

“That’s…” He truly does not know how to respond to that. He’s used to people being intimidated by him, by his size, his temper, his… everything. And this slim woman, strong as she looks, has dismissed him as a threat completely. He thinks maybe he should be insulted, but he’s more worried about what could have happened to her if her judgement hadn’t been as accurate. 

But she’d sized him up accurately. Maybe she has a better idea of what she’s doing than he does. 

“There’s got to be a better way for you to get to your friend,” he says finally.

Her lips twist. “Not really. There’s no way I could afford a flight, and trains are even more expensive. And I don’t have a license, let alone a car. Hitchhiking’s all I’ve got, unless I start walking.”

“Where’s your friend?” he asks, berating himself internally. He can’t seriously be considering this. 

The way her expression lifts immediately tears into his resolve. “Sacramento,” she says quickly. “Almost straight west.”

He has a vague memory of the letter he’d read that morning mentioning the same city. He’d wonder at the coincidence if this entire day hadn’t been bizarre enough already. Maybe the universe had known something he hadn’t when he’d left. 

“I can’t promise anything,” he warns. “I don’t even know where I’m going. And you’ve seen my driving. You’d probably be better off walking.”

A grin splits her face, and he’s reminded all at once how young and pretty his new travel companion is. It makes him all the more determined to make sure she gets to her friend without dealing with any other creeps. Or at least, any creeps worse than him. “Thank you so much,” she gushes. “I probably don’t have enough for all the gas, but I can get you coffee, or --”

He shakes his head before she can finish. “It’s fine, I’m not worried about money.”

Her eyes narrow slightly. “Not money?”

“Not anything,” he clarifies quickly. “I just don’t want to see you on the news after you get stabbed by some psycho.”

She laughs, a bright and beautiful sound. “I can take care of myself,” she assures him.

He half-smiles. “I believe that.” Forgetting about the coffee he’d stopped for, he starts the car again and starts out of the parking lot. The adrenaline from this encounter will keep him going for another hour at least. His hands already feel like they’re vibrating. 

“I never got your name,” she says as he stops at the light on the other side of the on ramp.

 _‘Kylo’_ his mind says, but what comes out is “Ben.”

He catches her smile out of the corner of her eye. “Ben. It suits you. I’m Rey.”

“That suits you,” he responds, meaning it. 

_Rey_. 

He wonders how long it is to Sacramento. As he pulls onto the highway, the distance before him seems less endless, less empty than it did before. 

**Author's Note:**

> Would love to know what you thought!


End file.
